Patchwork is a mid-level library of Unix system administration primitives such
as “install package” or “create user account”, interrogative functionality for
introspecting system state, and other commonly useful functions built on top of
the Fabric library.

Specifically:

Primary API calls strive to be idempotent: they may be called multiple
times in a row without unwanted changes piling up or causing errors.

Patchwork is just an API: it has no concept of “recipes”, “manifests”,
“classes”, “roles” or other high level organizational units. This is left up
to the user or wrapping libraries.

This is one way Patchwork differs from larger configuration management
frameworks like Chef or Puppet. Patchwork is closest in nature to those tools’
“resources.”

It is implemented in shell calls, typically sent over SSH from a
local workstation.

However, where possible, its functions expect a baseline Invoke
Context object and can thus run locally or remotely,
depending on the specific context supplied by the caller.

While Patchwork has been released with a major version number to signal
adherence to semantic versioning, it’s still early in development and has not
fully achieved its design vision yet.

We expect it to gain maturity in tandem with the adoption and development of
Fabric 2. It’s also highly likely that Patchwork will see a few major releases
as its API (and those of its sister library, invocations) matures.